Microcontrollers are, without a doubt, amazing little things. They are versatile, powerful, and extremely tiny. Unfortunately, the latter trait is also shared by both my wallet and my programming skills. My understanding of C is poor, and I can hardly afford to buy something like an Arduino or a decent ISP. And in any case, the Arduino would be overkill for many of my projects, which only need simple IC’s.

But as many of you know, DIY always finds a way. This tutorial is meant for those among us with no budgets or programming experience who want to start using these little machines. It is not based around the ATmega328 (the Arduino Uno chip), but rather the Attiny line of chips (the Atiny85 and Attiny2313, to be specific). The total cost of this project can go as lower than $15 if you know where to buy from, and you can still use the original Arduino IDE and language to program your projects in the end. Keep in mind that you will need some soldering skills to get this project done.

While working on an update for my CPU Usage LEDs project, I thought why not just make it into a universal RGB LED controller? The CPU Usage LEDs controller took a value between 0 and 255, worked out what colour it should be and then fade to that colour. This was very limiting; changing what colours it used and how it fades required a firmware update. With this universal RGB LED controller the host software does all the work and the controller is simply told what brightness the red, green and blue LEDs should be. To make it as easy as possible to interface with the controller I created a library which deals with all the LibUSB stuff.

This library is an update of the software PWM driver you can find here.
This update implements also progressive start / stop features. So, with this one, you can drive up to 4 motors independently controlling: speed, direction, slow start / stop

We wrote this whole page to try to make buyers of USBasp programmer clones aware of what’s possibly out there for sale and the conclusion we came to about the units we bought, after quite some investigative work IT SIMPLY DOES NOT REALLY WORK !!!

We tried to read the flash content, and the blue led flashes, but that’s about it … it does not work

This video by Ray Wang demonstrates HID-class USB serial communication for AVRs using the V-USB library:

Serial communication is helpful for debugging and checking sensor values, and HID-class means it can work on all operating systems without driver installation. This is useful for many software-only USB projects such as based on ATmega328 or ATtiny45/85. To receive and send messages between the device and host, I wrote an HID serial monitor, similar to a standard serial monitor, using Processing.

The main incentive behind this project was to see how much I could cram, in terms of both hardware and software, into a wristwatch-like device that is no larger than the display itself. An OLED display was chosen for being only 1.5mm thick and not requiring a backlight (each pixel produces its own light), but mostly because they look cool. The watch was originally going to have a 0.96″ display, but this proved too difficult to get all the things I wanted underneath it. Going up a size to 1.3″ was perfect.

The FabISP is an in-system programmer for AVR microcontrollers, designed for production within a FabLab. That is, it allows you to program the microcontrollers on other boards you make, using nothing but a USB cable and 6-pin IDC to 6-pin IDC cable. It’s based on the USBtiny and V-USB firmwares, which allow the ATtiny44 to perform USB communication in software. Programming can be done through avrdude

What’s with mint boxes and electronics? Beats me, but they are somehow made for each other. I had built ladyada’s USBtinyISP v1.0 circuit on a breadboard which I used every other day. It worked sporadically(and never at hour of need), used up half of my breadboard and looked ugly. So I decided to try my hand at home PCB fabrication and build it in, of course, a tiny tic-tac box. Since I was a beginner, the circuit is easy and single-sided and uses crystal instead of ceramic oscillator.

Cap’n ArrDrownHo! is the lovechild of Ardweeny and Boarduino and he’s here to commandeer your AVR ships. ArrDrownHo! inherits pros of both and cons of neither. Pick up an AVR chip and start prototyping instantly on a breadboard! Want to replace that costly Arduino in your project with a cheap AVR, but don’t know how? Use the simple plug-and-play ArrDrownHo! piggybacked onto the AVR to act as interface for programming and provide power.